Altmetric Attention Scores and Citations of Published Research With or Without Preprints

This cross-sectional study assesses how frequently research articles published in the clinical journals with high impact factors are preprinted and whether preprinting is associated with changes in media attention and citation counts.


Introduction
Use of preprints, defined as preliminary research reports that have not undergone peer review, in clinical and health science research has increased in recent years, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 1,2Although high-impact clinical journals have publication policies supportive of preprints, 3 concerns remain that posting a preprint before submission to a peer-reviewed journal may jeopardize publication, especially if the preprint generates media attention and citations. 4While biology articles with corresponding preprints have received greater attention than those without, 5 little is known about the highest-impact clinical research.Therefore, we aimed to assess how frequently research articles published in the highest-impact clinical journals are preprinted and whether media attention and citations differed between articles with and without corresponding preprints.

Methods
In accordance with the Common Rule, this cross-sectional study was exempt from ethics review and informed consent because it used public nonidentifiable data.We followed the STROBE reporting guideline.
We identified 25 high-impact journals according to InCites Journal Citation Reports, including the 6 general and internal medicine journals and the 2 clinical medicine journals across 9 subspecialities with the highest impact factors (Table 1).We also included JAMA Network Open as it publishes general and subspecialty clinical articles.We searched PubMed for all records of these journals indexed in 2022 (after the COVID-19 pandemic had largely subsided) and manually identified original research articles.First, we identified preprints automatically linked to published articles in the sample using the bioRxiv/medRxiv application programming interface (API).To locate preprints missed by the API or posted on other platforms, we used WebScrapingAPI to conduct Google searches of published article titles and screened the first 5 records mentioning medRxiv, bioRxiv, or Social Science Research Network.Second, we identified the Altmetric Attention Score (Altmetric API) and citations (Dimensions API) for each article as of March 2024.
Within each journal with at least 1 article with a preprint, we calculated the differences in median Altmetric scores and citations between articles with and without preprints.We used Wilcoxon signed-rank test to evaluate whether the median of the distribution of the differences between medians across the 25 journals differed from 0. Two-tailed P < .05 was considered statistically significant.Data analysis was performed with R, version 4.2.1 (R Project for Statistical Computing).

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Author affiliations and article information are listed at the end of this article.
Open Access.This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License.The median (IQR) difference in medians between articles with and without preprints across journals was not significantly different from 0 for Altmetric Attention Scores (34.1 [6.0-191.0];P = .33)or citations (8.0 [3.0-30.8];P = .31)(Table 2).These findings were consistent even after accounting for time from publication to analysis and when stratified by COVID-19-related and non-COVID-19-related articles.

Table 1 .
Preprints of Clinical Research Subsequently Published in 25 High-Impact Journals Includes 6 general and internal medicine journals (and JAMA Network Open) and 2 clinical medicine journals for 9 subspecialties with the highest impact factors according to InCites Journal Citation Reports. a

JAMA Network Open | Medical Journals and Publishing Altmetric
Attention Scores and Citations of Published Research With or Without Preprints

Table 2 .
Journal-Level Differences in Median Altmetric Scores and Citation Counts Between Articles With and Without Corresponding Preprints The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology and CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians were excluded from these analyses because these journals had no articles with corresponding preprints.The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Diabetes Care, The Lancet Haematology, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, and The Lancet Oncology were excluded from these analyses because these journals did not publish any COVID-19-related articles with corresponding preprints.Annals of Internal Medicine, The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, and CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians were excluded from these analyses because these journals did not publish any non-COVID-19-related articles with corresponding preprints.
a b c